[vdrummer]

F***'in iTunes Library file (8Mb, ~7,000 songs) "cannot be read" for the second time in the 9 months I've had my 15" TiBook, and the iPhoto library (1,800 photos) has already been lost once. Had to rebuild each one each time, a total pain. Also, everytime I connect my iPod to the TiBook to transfer new files, I have to reset the iPod after transferring, because it ends up gagging on a song. Is this the kind of reliability I should expect or maybe do I have a bad hard drive or something?

[skipjack]

Originally posted by vdrummer:
do I have a bad hard drive or something?

How full is your hard drive?

[Gul Banana]

You should expect more reliability than that, thankfully. I myself have not ever had a corrupt library, though I've had to reset my iPod before.

[vdrummer]

Originally posted by skipjack:
How full is your hard drive?

I think each time I've lost a library (5 total, including Apple Mail twice), I've had less than 5% hard drive space available (see my similar post in Powerbook forum). Thanks,

Ron R.

[Developer]

You ran out of disk space. Keep it at 20% free.
If you should run out of disk space, under no circumstances quit any running application. Free some disk space first.

[Arkham_c]

I've got about 20GB of music in iTunes, and about 500 pics in iPhoto, and I have never lost either library.

I generally try to keep at least 5-6 GB free on my boot drive, and that helps avoid any major problems.

[vdrummer]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
I've got about 20GB of music in iTunes, and about 500 pics in iPhoto, and I have never lost either library.

I generally try to keep at least 5-6 GB free on my boot drive, and that helps avoid any major problems.

So by running with <5% of the drive free, the system starts to lose Mail prefs and libraries.

- Many folks on the forums attribute these problems to full hard drives; is this a system deficiency that Apple confirms?

- Is this a Unix problem, or something with OS X, or hard drive or something else? I've used DOS and Windows systems since '86 and never saw predictable file damage and loss like this. System slowdowns, yes, but not file corruption.

[Developer]

This is a CoreFoundation prob... - oops - "design decision". For performance reasons CoreFoundation doesn't return any error codes. According to Apple if anything goes wrong it is better for an app to just crash, so you notice problems earlier in development.

So any app using (NSUserDefaults->)CFPreferences->CoreFoundation never notices that writing the preferences failed due to the disk being full, and since the app doesn't know about the error, it can't handle it gracefully (like putting up a dialog telling you to clear some disk space).

[vdrummer]

Originally posted by Developer:
This is a CoreFoundation prob... - oops - "design decision". For performance reasons CoreFoundation doesn't return any error codes. According to Apple if anything goes wrong it is better for an app to just crash, so you notice problems earlier in development.

So any app using (NSUserDefaults->)CFPreferences->CoreFoundation never notices that writing the preferences failed due to the disk being full, and since the app doesn't know about the error, it can't handle it gracefully (like putting up a dialog telling you to clear some disk space).

So it sounds like you're saying that it's more of a OS X design problem, yes? And, BTW, I had 4.5 GB free on a 60 Gb drive when I lost the iTunes library (8 Mb file).

Since you're saying keep 20% free, then I have, effectively, a 48 Gb drive. I guess I have less than what I thought I had.